Path of Exile 2 is back at 350K concurrent users just on Steam.

Path of Exile 2 by Grinding Gear Games is back at 350K concurrent users just on Steam 👀.

It introduced the revolutionary 𝐚𝐬𝐲𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 update and went free for the weekend, so what happened?

▪️ Because economy and trading is so important in PoE, this is the most drastic change in last 10 years 😲. This essentially enables you to put items for trade, go offline and other players can buy them from you without your interaction. Auction houses in loot based RPGs usually have detrimental effect as we saw with Diablo 3, but here it could be a different case, but only time will tell, I am still not sure what will be the full effect of this rapid acceleration of synchronous player trading.

▪️ The game is currently in paid early access, but it went completely free for last 3 days, which is a great move as you can just buy in after and your whole progress will stay. As you see on the bottom charts, PoE works on 3 month league cycles which always brings back players. Not only PoE2 went over its previous early access player peak now but also PoE 1 is back on track 💹 with its usual content update, which slowed down during release of PoE2.

▪️ The update also added 1 new act and 3 new interlude acts, new league mechanic, sprinting 🏃‍♂️ feature (a big quality of life upgrade), major skill rebalance, new endgame content and new type of support skills. No more repeating the game through the second difficulty.

I am really positive about the changes, but I will be watching the trading system very closely 😎. If this change proves positive I am expecting multiple games to follow up on this semi-automatic trade model of player economy.